Full movie description "Play for Today The Fishing Party":

Three miners plan a weekend fishing.

Reviews of the Play for Today The Fishing Party

It's a remarkable testimony to a play that over thirty years later, whenever I think of great television plays, this is the first one that comes to my mind. It's really a simple tale of innocents abroad, with a touch of comedy of manners.A group of Northern English miners take a fishing holiday on which little goes right, from a snobbish landlady who resents their presence in the guest house to their discovering that the sea isn't really their element.

So it sounds as if it should have been a pleasant but throwaway item, but it has something that -- for me at least -- makes it stick. And I think it has to be the accuracy of the character writing. I grew up in an industrial Northern English town, and I recognised these characters. And I reckon that one of the hardest things in writing is to make good characters interesting -- interesting villains are so much easier. The Fishing Party succeeds with a vengeance; the miners have a raw, earthy goodness, holy fools that all the (admittedly petty) wickedness and adversity around them just passes by, but are never anything less than real.